


For the Populace

by livrelibre



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: F/F, Femslash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:19:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1259410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livrelibre/pseuds/livrelibre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The awkward romance of a repressed political flack for the supernatural City Council who, due to recent intimations of mortality, has had her comfortable and deep denial disturbed and her carefully maintained mask ripped off (she put a lot of work into that mask!) and now has to deal with feeeeelings for a failed, bitter and cynical print journalist who’s seen her livelihood go down in flames (literally and don’t believe those insurance investigators; she had NOTHING to do with it) and has been lied to one too many times to believe in anything much less institutions like romance and the words of a woman trained to lie professionally and has only recently stopped drinking everything in sight to deal. But it’s hard to completely discount the possibility of love with the precariousness of life and the importance of days and the seizing thereof so recently reinforced and Cecil gushing about Carlos in an unseemly fashion over the radio (radio professional my ass, thinks Leann; must he be so obvious about his . . .feelings so publicly? it’s the kind of thing that begs for re-education, plus it’s so undignified and exposed, thinks Trish).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. So That Happened

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Second Date](https://archiveofourown.org/works/940267) by [thingswithwings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings). 



> Just an unbetaed snippet which may or may not have a continuation. Takes place after and entirely inspired by [Second Date](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/205352.html) by [](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/) **thingswithwings**  , which you should listen to (or read) first because, not only will this not make sense, but also it’s awesome. And I’m not just saying that because I was lucky enough to get to voice Trish. I was entirely incepted into this pairing by the brilliance of thingswithwings’ writing and I thank her for it.

Trish sits at the Moonlight All Night Diner, trying to pretend like she just happened to stop by for no real reason, you know just for coffee and a slice of invisible pie. Forget about the fact that she’s not wearing her usual black City Council-approved robes and had stood in front of her office emergency clothes closet for far too long trying to decide which shade of black brought out her eyes more and which poncho said “hey I’m just here for some low pressure hanging out and getting to know you; not like you’re the last person I’d see flash before my eyes as I died a horrible and bloody death.” Forget about the fact that she hasn’t stepped foot inside the diner since she, at the behest of the City Council, tried to have the place shut down for violating the zoning ordinances for moonlight (really this area was supposed to be all void all the time). And let’s not mention that Cecil’s show had broadcast her speech live so people are staring at her and the door every time it opens. Rude! It’s like no one had anything better to do or had ever been re-educated for poking their noses where they don’t belong. Honestly, manners these days. The Secret Police have gotten unforgivably lax. She might have to write a memo and leave it lying on her desk.

 

She didn’t really specify a time and maybe . . .the populace hadn’t even been listening to the radio; she knows how hard some citizens have been taking the decline of traditional community media lately. She wishes the invisible pie were a little less invisible so it didn’t look like she was just playing with her fork, but thank the glow cloud for bottomless cups of coffee. That’s one thing the diner does right. She lost her spoon in there in her distraction when the door opened while she was stirring her sugar and cream in. So if she maybe just savors this fine cup of coffee a little longer there’s no harm in it. . .

 

Oh, who is she kidding? The Secret Police are just a little too far away to hear her internal monologue (just in case, she thinks pointedly “I see you in that corner Ralph, don’t think I don’t and it’s not like you have any stones to throw; I know your license was revoked at the last City Council meeting”). Leann probably hadn’t heard the broadcast and if she heard it or some enterprising citizen told her, she probably isn’t going to come. Trish couldn’t even be bothered to draw her a picture for glow cloud’s sake; why would Leann go out of her way to meet a woman who had only fed her lies and careful indifference even before the paper had gone under, had in fact blocked any legitimate news from being reported for years and had contributed directly to the failure of Leann’s paper and the violation of every journalistic ethical principle she had ever held dear.

 

Trish stared moodily at the runes forming in the oil slick surface of her cup, watching them spell out “You’re the worst” in unmodified Sumerian. Trish’s lies had almost been responsible for the deaths of Leann and everyone else in town yet again and worse, she hadn’t even had the courage to tell her how she felt until they were both at death’s chittering door. Leann probably hated her, probably thought she was a liar and a coward and unworthy to even gaze upon her face. She was probably home laughing over that stupid Trish Hidge; she was probably telling her friends she wished she could see Trish’s face right now as she waited in vain for a . . .a woman who was standing right in front of her, waving a little awkwardly to get her attention and saying her name for what looked like the second (or third or fourth) time.

 

Wow, she looked perfect and beautiful. Trish, only through long years of careful media training and bloodstone circle indoctrination, narrowly avoided facepalming for this Cecilism and barely stuttered out, “Uh, hi! So you made it!”

____________________________________

Trish gaped at her, clearly startled back to the here and now. “Uh, hi! So you made it!”

Even when stating (or denying) the perfectly obvious and/or ridiculous, Trish Hidge was still infuriatingly adorable. No help for it then. Leann had it bad but she could at least pretend to play it cool.

“Yeah barely. I came down with a little bug but I think I’m getting over it.”

Trish stared at her.

OK, not her best effort. Leann scratched the back of her neck and dropped into the booth opposite Trish with an awkward chuckle. “Sorry, that was funnier in my head. It was better than my first thought: So I see you still have your spine. I’ve been trying to think of something clever and Katherine Hepburn-y to say for the last hour or so.”

“Well A+ for nailing both snappiness and burn.”

Mayday! Abort! Say something, anything else Leann!

“I try. I have been burning things for the last few hours. Turns out it’s a good method for getting rid of corpses; just douse ‘em in Old Grand-Dad and light ‘em up. You know, at first when I looked out my window I thought I was getting the DTs way too early. I thought I’d hit rock bottom but it turned out I just needed to hit some . . . things with the bottom of a rock. The paperweight on my desk was pretty effective as a bludgeon for any . . . things that tried to come through the cracks. And sour mix is pretty acidic, did you know? The broadcast cleared that up. Turns out terror is also pretty good for clearing up a hangover and making you reconsider your life choices. Looks like we both had a few personal revelations. And so . . here I am.”

Ugh shut up, shut up, shut up! Way to word vomit and A+ convincing Trish you’re not an alcoholic loser. And to think words were her business. No wonder the paper went under. Well, ok, that and the financial stuff.

But Trish didn’t seem like she was going to use her City Council-granted powers to disappear and was, in fact, smiling tentatively at her.

“Well, I’m really glad you made it OK. And I’m glad you came to meet me.”

A straightforward statement from Trish Hidge. Leann’s cool waved the white flag.


	2. Headcanon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So headcanon time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo. . .instead of starting to write things and then never finishing or posting anything, let's consider this an [ongoing experiment](http://livfic.dreamwidth.org/33884.html) in me just posting stuff about Trish and Leann unbetaed with no idea what I'm doing (clearly, tenses and time periods are wandering wildly) or where it's going (the head canon is mostly me trying to work stuff out; if there's a continuing story, this might not even be a part of it). Move along. Nothing to see here. Don't look at or think about the story. There is no story. There has never been a story and if there was, this wouldn't be it.

Trish and Leann met at the City Council press conferences--Trish a junior staffer standing behind Mayor Pamela Winchell while she talked about her favorite rocks and disavowed the latest thing that had crawled out of the Sand Wastes, Leann in her hungry beat reporter days before she realized that trying to get a straight answer about anything in Night Vale was a fruitless pursuit and that if she hated being ethically kettled and re-educated every second Tuesday then management was probably where it was it. Their eyes met across a crowd and blah blah blah. But it was a Romeo and Juliet kind of deal. No, probably not. 40s screwball comedy? Whatever, it just wasn’t gonna happen.

Trish had already pretty much sold her soul to the City Council (literally, more fool her--she hadn’t read the employment contract very carefully since it trailed off into 5 pt font and then weird characters that squirmed in nauseating ways) and even after she figured it out she thought she was probably better off than the radio station interns, who had an alarmingly high turnover rate and didn’t even get a stipend. She was close to the seat of power, and after the bloodstone circle initiation/swearing in she’d blacked out, she found her powers of denial (already pretty sharp after a childhood in Night Vale) had reached power player levels. She was on the fast track; she wasn’t using her feelings anyway so who cared? Until she met Leann. Dogged, infuriating, beautiful Leann.

Leann had been wandering post-college. She’d been doing a cross-country road trip, William Least Heat-Moon style, and gathering experience, seeing the real America, getting the stories of the ordinary people off the beaten track and eventually hoping to write the kind of New Journalism she’d loved reading in school. She’d been crossing the desert in her old beater, following strange lights in the sky, racing her car’s (or some car’s) shadow down the side of a dusty endless highway, and getting weird staticky bursts from the radio that occasionally resolved into the mellifluous (she liked that word) voice of a community announcer, when her car had slowly but surely died just outside a small town. She’d had a little breakdown herself by the side of the road and was not particularly reassured when black balaclavaed police officers rolled up beside her. I mean, who wore balaclavas in that kind of heat? Thoughts of sundown towns shivered through her as she politely and carefully answered questions about her trip as they towed her into town eventually, but they just dropped her off at the mechanic’s with a vague but menacing admonition to be careful around these parts. So no disappearances (that wouldn’t happen for at least another few months), but also no parts at the mechanic’s. While waiting for it to arrive she saw a position open at the Night Vale Daily Journal and somehow (she was never quite sure how it happened later, that whole trip and her previous life somehow shimmering into heat haze when she thought too hard about it), she ended up getting it and staying.

Why? Who knows--the itch to know, to get to the bottom of this weird little town, to blow the lid off the story of the century was probably a large part of it. But you couldn’t stay in NIght Vale for any extended period of time without realizing the futility of that, no matter how hard you tried. You also couldn’t avoid somehow settling into the weirdness yourself and that could be part of it. Leann had always stood out wherever she was, but in Night Vale, all the things that stood out about her everywhere else were the least of her problems. She still stood out but mostly because she believed in things like mountains and journalistic ethics and truth (at least at the beginning, though she was never able to fully shake that mountain thing). Then there were the people and their endless stories. That was the big thing, in retrospect. The weird got normal and the truth got relative, but the people, her community, never got old. And they deserved to have their stories told, deserved some accounting about the everyday vagaries and monstrosities that beset them from the town, from the City Council and Mayor Pamela Winchell. From that gorgeous, unflappable pressed PR mannequin Trish Hidge who denied all of her FOIA requests (“That’s not even a thing!” Yes it IS Trish; yes, it is!).


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The continuing failboat adventures of Trish and Leann. Leann's turn

So that whole birthday celebration got way out of hand Leann will admit privately now. All right, so she also admitted it to Cecil by whisper through mail slot and Morse Code tapping but that was just the guilt and Johnny Walker talking she’s pretty sure. There’s nothing like turning 40 and realizing you’ve not got a lot to show for it except for a failing paper, the dashing of all your youthful hopes and dreams, and an infuriatingly unattainable --uh, source, to make a lady go try and bury her despair in a defiant display of champagne rivers and cakes with moon rock topping. If you’re gonna go down, then go big or go home. Fiddle while Rome (or your printing facility) burns and all that. After sobering up, it seemed like less of a good idea though, especially when dealing with an epic hangover while the Secret Police showed up. It wasn’t so much the financial malfeasance (they actually gave her top marks for that) but more the fact she had failed to give them any cake and champagne that was her final downfall. Greedy bastards.

 

So much of the last few years were like that in retrospect. Seemed like a good idea at the time because why the fuck not, but not so much. I mean bloggers - sure they weren’t real journalists and could make up any old thing they wanted but that didn’t mean they had to die. No matter how good an idea it seemed anytime she looked at the Drudge Report. After all, you get started down the road of killing all liars and then you’d have to take out novelists, city councillors and yourself and then where would you be? Dead that’s what. Upon reflection, some of her other initiatives hadn’t been such bright ideas either. The front page ad thing had been an “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” move and the imagine your own news venture had been half performance art, half desperate revenue grab. Now she was pretty glad she hadn’t gotten around to implementing the paywall on the imaginary section of the website or started charging people for comments (free speech, her ass).

 

She’d come into this whole thing with high hopes. Well, at least ground level hopes, a haze of muddled positivity and pessimism like low lying fog. By the time she had gotten off the beat, she’d had no illusions about actually getting any truth out of City Council or certain of its representatives, but she had no idea how far yet she had to fall. Maybe she’d thought as management she’d be able to effect some change at a higher level but she was quickly disabused of that notion. There were whole new levels of bullshit at management level. And the pettiness and politics! Re-education was preferable to staff meetings. Nobody on the staff was Woodward or Bernstein. No, it was all pointless whining about staplers (admittedly a little prone to snapping at fingers) and the coffee in the break room (who hadn’t gotten used to kale-flavored coffee by now?). Seriously, journalists these days. All soft. The newbies either kept pressing her to take the fight to City Council (literally--they had the Uzis all ready to go) or didn’t have the sense the glow cloud gave an earthworm. When they weren’t making up quotes from “sources,” like their surgically attached hand puppets, and actually tried reporting, her turnover rate went up to the level of the community radio interns. The veteran reporters just drank at their desks when they weren’t curled up under them, whimpering. Some days Leann was tempted to join them, but that was what her own office was for. And that was all before you even got to all of the difficulties of running a community newspaper in this day and age. Ad revenue was getting as scarce as water at the riverfront complex or fruits and vegetables at the farmer’s market. Anything besides puff pieces had both City Council and the newspaper’s board (she made the traditional warding symbol when invoking them by thought or word) breathing down her neck. That hair raising sensation of being watched from behind, the clammy sensation on the nape, the certainty that every moment could be your last--there was nothing like going up against the board to add a shot of adrenaline and terror to her life. It was almost like the old days, almost made her feel alive again. 

 

But nothing in her current position topped those days when, due to tragic cub reporter shortages, she got to walk her old City Council beat with Trish. Beautiful, beautiful lying Trish who wouldn't even draw her a picture of the ...things, who never gave her quotes, who never returned her calls (um, for statements), who just stonewalled her at every turn. But then their eyes would meet during the media scrum and there was just something about they way Trish snapped her name during the Q&As. Her reporter’s instincts told her there was something there, a story waiting to be told. Behind the steady denials of ...things, mountains and the latest traffic reports, it sometimes felt like Trish was trying to communicate something to her, a truth she couldn’t help giving away no matter how she tried to hide it. Trish’s powers were hitting Mayor Winchell levels but some things were impossible to deny. Angsty birthday benders aside, Leann was pretty sure she wasn’t indulging herself to make herself feel better. She was going to break this story eventually and she hoped Trish realized it too.


End file.
